DDoS Attacks Take Down Feedly, Evernote

UPDATED — News aggregator Feedly is still offline Thursday as continues to battle a series of distributed denial of service attacks that’s kept the service down for two consecutive days.

The site was able to get back online shortly after 3 p.m. Wednesday after it neutralized the first DDoS attack , only to get hit again Thursday morning.

“The criminal has launched his second wave of DDoS attack this morning,” CEO and founder Edwin Khodabakchian noted on the company’s blog just after 7 a.m today, “The ops team has reviewed the attacks and is working on building a second line of defense to neutralize this second attack.”

In a blog entry on Wednesday, Feedly first acknowledged that an attacker was trying to extort an unnamed sum of money from the company to stop the attack, but at the time Khodabakchian insisted it was refusing to give in to blackmail attempts.

The service is under a denial of service attack. We are working with our network provider to deflect it. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Khodabakchian has reassured users that the outage is still merely DDoS-related and that none of its users’ information has been compromised in the attack. The blog points out that Feedly is continuing to work with network providers to help mitigate the attack to the best of its ability but as it makes some changes to its infrastructure, it will be difficult for the company to communicate as frequently as it would like to with its users.

“We apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you for your support and understanding as we work our way through these waves of attacks,” Khodabakchian said.

Feedly – available for web browsers and iOS and Android platforms – is an RSS reader that saw a significant uptick in users when Google announced it was going to be ending its Reader service in March 2013.

The note-taking service Evernote also found itself the victim of a DDoS attack this week.

Evernote service is currently unavailable. We are working to resolve the issue. Updates to follow. Thanks for your patience.

The attack that targeted Evernote took the service offline around 5:30 p.m. EST Tuesday for about five hours. According to Twitter, Evernote got back up and running shortly after 10 p.m.

The company notes users may experience a ‘hiccup or two’ over the next 24 hours as it readjusts post-attack.

The app, which lets users take notes on the go, surpassed 100 million total users around this time last month, the lion’s share based in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

It remains unclear if the two DDoS attacks are related but Evernote did recently integrate its service with Feedly Pro, a premium version of the RSS reader, at the end of April.

In March social networking site Meetup.com and project management console Basecamp were both knocked offline following DDoS attacks where the attackers demanded a ransom to stop the slamming the sites with traffic.

High-volume denial of service attacks are growing more frequent according to research published by Arbor Networks earlier this year. Attacks between 100 Gbps and 300 Gbps, which allow attackers to knock services offline for extended periods of time, are becoming the new norm.

“It seems that attackers are trying to achieve a goal, be it to impact service availability or as part of a much broader attack campaign, distract from financial fraud and theft,” Arbor Networks solutions archictect Darren Anstee said at the time.

About Chris Brook

"Distrust and caution are the parents of security" - Benjamin Franklin

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